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Re: how to write proper user case stories

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From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 4, 2022 10:39PM

If you're going to write user case stories, their structure should be agreed between all the relevant stakeholders, such as the developers, testers, business analysts, project manager etc.

There are a variety of options, such as unstructured narrative, behaviour-driven development (BDD) and specification by example (SBE).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-driven_development#Behavioral_specifications
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specification_by_example

There are pros and cons to each approach. Unstructured narrative is easy to write, but it may lack testable requirements. BDD is more difficult to learn, but the stories are relatively easy to convert into automated tests (if that's what you want to do). I don't have any experience of SBE, but it seems weird.

With all these approaches there is a balance between giving the developer the freedom to find the optimum solution and specifying exactly how something should be implemented. It's up to the stakeholders to decide where this balance should be. For instance, if your story says that error messages for forms must be implemented using ARIA live regions, that would preclude the developer from choosing to use server-side data validation instead of client-side validation.

That said, writing user stories for accessibility requirements seems odd to me because you wouldn't do this for security requirements such as sanitising input data, avoiding buffer and counter overflows etc. - these should be in development standards documents, not project specifications. You could implement them as acceptance criteria for your existing user stories, but that would result in a lot of duplication. The exception would be for accessibility tools, such as a style switcher, which could be a story in itself.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd